Bitcoin’s Lightning Community, the layer-two protocol designed to facilitate quicker and cheaper transactions, has surpassed $1 billion in month-to-month transaction quantity, in line with new knowledge from River.
In November 2025, the community processed an estimated $1.17 billion throughout 5.22 million transactions, marking a milestone in adoption regardless of Bitcoin’s stagnant value efficiency all year long.
River’s analysis aggregates anonymized knowledge from main Lightning node operators to offer a network-wide estimate. Their methodology accounts for overlapping channels and extrapolates to untracked nodes, giving a extra correct image of the Lightning ecosystem.
“This method permits us to debunk misconceptions that Lightning adoption isn’t occurring,” River stated, noting contributions from entities together with ACINQ, Kraken, Breez, Lightspark, LQWD, and others, overlaying over 50% of community capability.
Curiously, the transaction depend fell barely in comparison with 2023. Researchers attribute this to the fading of micropayment experiments in gaming and messaging that had briefly inflated exercise.
Whereas these functions didn’t obtain sustained adoption, River stated they anticipate future experimentation — notably with AI-powered agentic funds — to drive new spikes in community utilization.
Final week, Lightning Labs launched an open-source toolkit that permits AI brokers to run Lightning nodes, make autonomous funds, and host paid providers utilizing the Community, addressing the necessity for native, machine-to-machine transactions.
Bitcoin lightning transactions shifts towards bigger transfers
Regardless of being generally known as a community for micropayments, the common Lightning transaction in November 2025 was $223, up from $118 the earlier yr. Analysts say this displays the dominant use case in the present day: transferring bigger sums between exchanges reasonably than on a regular basis small purchases.
“Micropayment idea instructed high-frequency, low-value funds, however psychological transaction prices for people restrict this habits,” River defined in a social media report. “AI brokers, which don’t incur psychological prices, might change this dynamic, doubtlessly resulting in extra frequent, smaller funds sooner or later.”
Lightning Community’s rise highlights a layer of Bitcoin adoption that value charts usually miss, pushed by trade exercise and a rising variety of companies accepting this type of fee.
Crossing $1 billion in month-to-month quantity marks a milestone for Bitcoin’s layer-two infrastructure and alerts progress towards utilizing BTC as a method of transaction and settlement.
Trying forward, River plans to launch a complete report on Bitcoin adoption subsequent week, which is able to embrace further metrics exhibiting significant progress in utilization and integration throughout the crypto ecosystem.
